The Scent of Shadows Free with Bonus Material

by Vicki Pettersson

  I heard a shot of laughter from the direction of the children’s ward, saw a sole female cat out on patrol, two kittens stumbling along behind her, and increased my pace, intent on arriving at Greta’s undetected. I’d just turned the last corner, casting a final, furtive glance behind me, when I slammed into something, someone, who grunted and gave with the impact.

  “Warren.” We both stepped back, each startled by the other, and I frowned when I saw the color drain from his face. “Are you okay?”

  “Of course.” His words were as jerky as his movements, and he swallowed hard. “I’m fine.”

  But I’d never seen him looking more disoriented. He was sweating, pale, and bleary-eyed, and all the crazed self-assurance I so readily associated with him was gone. In its place was a man who looked tired and old and scared. Whatever had transpired in the hours since I’d last seen him, it had left him uncertain and shaky.

  “You don’t look fine. You look funny.” I sniffed lightly at the air. “You smell funny.”

  “Well, we can’t all look as good as you, now, can we?” he snapped, a thin hand rising to rub at his face.

  “Geez, Warren.” I drew back. “What happened? What did Greta say?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss my therapy sessions with you.” I must have looked as injured as I felt because he cursed beneath his breath and tried to soften his words. “Look, Gregor’s been out there, alone, for over a dozen hours. I’m just…worried. I’m going after him.”

  “But…why can’t someone else go? The Shadows have targeted you.” Because of me, I thought, and guilt speared through me now that I could see the toll it was taking on him.

  “I’m the most experienced,” he corrected, standing taller. “We can’t lose Gregor. He’s the only one of us—other than myself—who’s held his place in the Zodiac for more than twelve months.”

  “What about Micah? Or Hunter?”

  He shook his head. “Talented, both of them, but they’re both new recruits. Micah’s not even supposed to be a star sign. He’s support staff, like Greta.”

  “So it hasn’t just been five agents killed in the last few months—”

  “It’s been ten. Ten of the finest,” he finished, voice weary.

  “Jesus,” I said under my breath.

  “We replenish the signs only to have them destroyed again. One, our Virgo, the very next day.” He looked at me, and his face was hard again. I’d seen this kind of determination before. I’d captured it with my camera on the faces of street people who knew all was lost but were determined to go on anyway. “I won’t lose another. I’m going out there, I’m going to retrieve Gregor, and then I’m going to shut down the Zodiac. We’ll wait until the troop is whole again, strong again. Then we’ll take on the Shadow warriors as a team.”

  “You mean…leave the city vulnerable?”

  He closed his eyes, and they moved like minnows beneath their lids, as if he were already watching the outcome of that decision. “We have no choice.”

  “For how long?”

  “As long as it takes to train up a new Zodiac force. A year. Maybe more.”

  “A year!” I exclaimed, thinking of all the damage Ajax and his ilk could do in that amount of time. Thinking also of young teenage girls being attacked in Quik-Marts and the desert, and left there to die. “That’s too long.”

  “Got a better idea?” His eyes snapped open, fired on me.

  “Hey, don’t take it out on me! I’m just saying—”

  “Well, just don’t!”

  “God,” I exclaimed, balling my fists. “Why are you so upset with me? What did I do?”

  “I’m not—” He cut off his words as he realized he was yelling, and inhaled deeply. On the exhale he continued. “I’m not upset with you, okay?” he lied. “Greta and I had some things to discuss and they’ve put me on edge. I’m sorry for yelling. I’ve got to go.”

  His fear reached out to burn the lining in my nose. “Wait a minute. Things? Like me?”

  “Things,” he mimicked sharply, “that are confidential. It’s not your business what I discussed with Greta.”

  “It’s my business when you come out of that room treating me like a stranger. Like an enemy.” I folded my arms as he opened his mouth to deny it. “The conversation lingers on you, Warren. It smells like an industrial solution. It’s metallic and cold, and it’s heightening as we speak. Why were you discussing me with Greta?”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything,” he whispered. “I’ve done enough for you.”

  I drew back, surprised. Who was this man? I angled my head, exploring the air around him with my thoughts; nasal receptors probing like centipede legs.

  “Stop it,” he ordered, and an invisible mental wall rose like a tower around him. He pushed past me and began stalking away.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “It’s you!” he yelled, whirling on me with hot and furious eyes. “Don’t you get it? It’s not me, it’s you!”

  I stared into those angry eyes, watched as they banked, smoked, then dimmed. Unfeeling now. Apathetic. Dead. He’s shut down on me, I thought with injured wonder. He just closed me out, turned me off.

  I felt my eyes grow wide, and my breath stuttered out of me on a whisper. “You bastard. You’re the one who brought me into this, remember? You yelled ‘Eureka!’ and jumped in front of my car! You knocked me out and made me into this,” I said, motioning up and down Olivia’s body.

  “You want your life back, Joanna?” he asked, surprising me by using my real name so openly. I looked around but whipped my attention back to him when he took a step toward me. “Or, excuse me, I mean that empty excuse of an existence you called a life? Well, fine. Once we find a way to get you out of here, we’ll cut you loose. Physically. Mentally. Completely. Happy?”

  I would have been; a handful of days, or even hours, earlier. But this was abandonment, and even less of a choice than he’d offered me before. So why now?

  I tilted my head and took a step toward him. “You’re afraid of me.”

  Alarm lashed through my gut like a whip, and Warren’s jaw clenched. He hadn’t wanted me to feel that, and tried to cover the slip with words. “We were wrong. I was wrong. We should have never approached you, never introduced you to the Zodiac at such a late age.”

  I ignored his words, paying heed only to the emotions rippling like hot oil beneath the waxy exterior. “You don’t trust me.”

  “I don’t trust the Shadow in you!”

  My body jerked before I could control it and my heart skipped a beat. A wire of panic began to spread outward from the core of my belly. He’d been the last person in this subterranean hell I’d have expected to utter those words. Even though I suspected Warren of hiding secrets, I thought they’d had to do with Tekla or some troop dynamic I had yet to understand. But not me. Somehow, I’d taken it for granted, from the beginning, that he’d always be on my side. “And what about the Light? What about my mother’s side?”

  “Your mother,” he scoffed, bitterness oozing like venom to coat the walls around us. “Zoe’s gone, Joanna. She’s so gone she’s never coming back. Perhaps she lived with the Shadow side so long that she began to enjoy it. Who knows? She could be there now, living a life of ease, because it is so much easier, you know…” I did know. “Shit, for all we know she could be the one feeding the Tulpa information about our star signs—”

  “No.” I shook my head hard. “She wouldn’t.”

  “And how do you know what she would or wouldn’t do? You never knew her at all.”

  My mouth trembled closed. He had me there.

  “We’ll forget Zoe ever existed, and soon we’ll do the same with you. Then we can all just go back to living in our separate realities.”

  My heart cracked at that, and I knew Warren sensed it. He could feel and smell and hear the echo of it in his blood…if only he wanted to. “So…just like that?”

  He looked me over, his face softening momentaril
y, and he blinked. Then it hardened again, his emotions petrified, and it turned him into something other than a crazed bum and a leader of the underworld. It nullified him. “I have to go.”

  “Just like that, Warren?” I repeated, raising my voice after him. “You’re going to turn your back on me like I didn’t lose my entire life, my identity, my sister? Like nobody’s trying to kill me too?” He kept walking and I raised my voice. “Like my eyes didn’t bleed from their own fucking sockets?”

  No response, just the silly little slap and slide of his gait. Suddenly, though, it didn’t look so silly. It looked resolute. Defeated. Final.

  “What about this special connection we’re supposed to have, huh? What about that?” He rounded the corner without looking back, hearing me but not listening. “Don’t turn your fucking back on me!” I slammed my fist against the wall. “Warren!”

  My voice echoed emptily down the hall, then trailed away in a choked whisper. “Don’t…don’t leave…”

  Slumping against the wall, I tried to catch my breath. How could he? He knew me, who I was and why. Hadn’t he held me while I lay sobbing on the floor, watching my own funeral play out on the local news like some sick reality show? He knows me, I thought, the real me. He knows…

  “That I don’t even know myself.”

  Shaking, I pushed away from the wall. I didn’t want to break down here in the hallway where anyone could see me. Where Warren’s mistrust lingered like a virus.

  So I lunged for the closest escape, Greta’s door, and it swung open so quickly I was two steps inside before I realized I’d forgotten to knock. Half blind with shock and self-pity, I barely registered Greta’s surprise or the way she jolted before she could control it. Her hands disappeared behind her back and she backed into her dressing table, my reflected face pale and ink-eyed behind her.

  I seemed to be having that effect on people these days.

  She put a hand to her chest. “Olivia!”

  “I’m sorry. I just…I’m not—” I’m not Olivia. I’m not a superhero. I’m not anyone. I’m not going to cry, I thought, even as the first tear fell. “I just needed someone to talk to.”

  “Oh, dear. Of course you do.” She rushed to my side, though I saw her hesitate before wrapping her arms around me, and that made me cry even harder. She urged me toward her flowered settee. “Come, sit.”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated, accepting the tissue she pressed into my palm. I made a tentative dab at my eyes, then gave up and let my face crumble upon itself. “I didn’t know who else to come to and I needed to talk and I saw Warren and he won’t…he just…and he…”

  “Shh,” she said, pulling my head to her chest. I rested it there. Rested, it seemed, for the first time since my mother had left me a decade ago. I closed my eyes, slumped against her soft chest, and inhaled deeply. I knew her now, I realized. The twin bouquets of roses and the herbs she brewed for her own teas were fused upon her breath and skin, her signature scent stamped like a star on the surface of my temporal lobe.

  Gradually, the distress and misery left my body, sliding away through my tears, and I relaxed. My sobs were replaced by blessed nothingness, my body went limp against hers and, after one final sniffle, I lay silent. Greta continued to rock me, and though I knew she still feared what’d happened that morning, still feared me, I was so grateful for the momentary kindness that I didn’t care.

  “Thank you,” I said, swiping the back of my hand over my face. “Again.”

  “One of those days?” she asked quietly.

  “One of those lives,” I muttered, a bitter laugh hiccuping out of me.

  “You’re overwhelmed, dear. You’ve toured the sanctuary. Met the others—”

  I held up a hand and cut her off. I shot her an apologetic glance before lowering my palm and sighing. “What I am is tired of people either treating me like some chosen deliverer or an evil pariah. Mostly, though, I’m tired of pretending to be someone I’m not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I mean that I am so fucked up you wouldn’t be talking to me now if you knew who I really was. You’d run and hide and cower in the corner. You’d scream for help, you’d flee for your life. I met my gaze in the mirror. Isn’t that right, Joanna? Olivia? Whoever you think you are.

  Greta was watching me through the reflection too, but her face slid out of focus like in the movies, dissolving into the background as my own grew sharper. It was like my skin was thinning out, the bones beneath beginning to jut through the meticulously sculpted image reflected there. I swallowed hard.

  “Everyone I’ve ever been close to in my life is either dead because of me or I pushed them away long ago. Even my mother ultimately left because of me.”

  “That’s not true. That wasn’t your fault.”

  “And I like violence,” I went on, ignoring her, hands clasped tightly around my knees. “I’ve never admitted that before, but I do. I like to inflict it, I like the power of having inflicted it. I go into dark places searching for people to harm me, just so I can mete out justice in my own twisted way. With my fists, Greta. With the hatred that fills my heart.”

  She smiled, deflecting the seriousness of my words. “So, what you’re saying is you’re not perfect?”

  “You don’t understand,” I said, whirling on her. “I can’t do this! I can’t be the person you all expect me to be!”

  “But you’re Zoe Archer’s daughter.”

  “I’m the Tulpa’s daughter too.”

  She tilted her head. “Is that what’s bothering you?”

  “It’s what’s bothering everyone else,” I said, and told her about my run-in with Warren in the hall.

  Greta let out a weary sigh. “We had just finished a session. I hypnotized him, and he lived out his greatest fear in his mind. Your fates are deeply intertwined.”

  That brought my head up. “What do you mean?” I asked. “What fear?”

  Her eyes grew sad, the edges tightening as she shook her head. “That you, the woman he’s pinned all his hopes on, may betray him.”

  I could only gape at that. Warren’s actions made sense in the light of her words, but the words themselves didn’t quite compute. Me? Betray him?

  Greta tried for a reassuring smile. The tightness in her jaw kind of ruined it. “When your mind is that vulnerable, every sense is amplified. Seeing you so soon after he felt, watched, heard, and scented your betrayal—”

  “But I didn’t betray him!”

  “But his mind believed you had.” She leaned back on the settee and waited for my eventual nod. “Think of an athlete visualizing success for himself on the playing field. The mind can’t tell the difference between what’s imagined and what really happened. Warren lived out your betrayal, or the possibility of it, up here.” She pointed one delicate finger at her own head. “Don’t worry. He’ll be back to normal soon. As normal as Warren can be.”

  She was joking, but I couldn’t manage a smile. It did, however, get me thinking. “Do you think this hypnosis might help me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I tried to keep my voice steady, but my hope trembled out in the words. “I mean, would you be able to draw out more of the Light in me? Bring it more to the forefront? Make it stronger than the…other side?”

  She picked up her glasses from the small table at the head of the love seat, putting them on as if to examine me closely. “You’re concerned about the balance of Light and Shadow inside of you?”

  And she was watching me so expectantly that I found myself telling her; about the construction workers, and how I used my senses to plow through their lives. What it had cost them. And how it made me feel.

  “Powerful. Superior. Untouchable.” I swallowed hard, not wanting to go on, but afraid if I didn’t things would remain the same between Warren and me. Between us all. “I couldn’t predict what would happen, and, believe me, if I had I wouldn’t have done it, but I did do it, Greta. I did it on purpose.”

  I paused for
her reaction—revulsion? disgust?—but got only silence. Then a slow, rising interest that grew as Greta tapped her finger against her thigh and considered me over the rim of her glasses. “And you want me to rid you of the impulse to play God, is that it? So that if this ever happens again you won’t feel the need to stand in judgment?”

  “It’s not my job to put anyone in his place. I know that now, and I…I don’t want to be like him.” And I didn’t. I didn’t want lashing out at others to be my first instinct anymore. It was a defense that’d served me well after my attack, and in the years I’d had to live under Xavier’s disapproving stare, but it was different now. Because I was different.

  “I can’t plant anything in your psyche that isn’t already there, Olivia,” Greta said as I rose to pace the floor in front of us, my boot steps muffled beneath her Persian rug. “I also can’t remove Shadow impulses. It’s part of who you are.”

  I stopped before her. “But can you teach me to control it?”

  Greta pressed her lips together in a look so scrutinizing I was afraid the answer would be an immediate no. But after what felt like forever, she nodded, and motioned for me to recline where I was. A sigh rocketed from my body as tension uncoiled in my belly, and gratitude for this small kindness, when kindnesses had been so hard to come by of late, teared up in my eyes.

  Drawing a chenille blanket over my lower body, Greta loomed over me like a benevolent angel, and the last thing I saw were her earnest gray eyes, cloudy with intent. Then she slid a cool palm over my face and began to count. The numbers formed beneath my lids—cloudy and ephemeral and ghostly—and I began the backward spiral into the recesses of my own mind.

  I’d never been put under before, and therefore wasn’t sure that I could, but I listened to the soft lilt and direction of Greta’s musical voice and let her words settle into me, bone deep. My arms grew heavy at my side and my heartbeat slowed like an insect being caught and trapped under the sap of a weeping elm. My skull was light in contrast, thoughts floating there like feathers, as disconnected and random as if they belonged entirely to someone else.